Rebecca M. Donahue, West Lawn, with a photo of her deceased husband, former Wyomissing Officer Scott E. Donahue. He killed himself in 1997 over personal and job-related stresses typical of police work.

Rebecca M. Donahue still isn't sure what was in the mind of her husband before the police officer she loved pulled the trigger.

But she believes the stress of his job was partly to blame for the suicide of the Wyomissing police officer who, day after day, worked to solve others' problems.

"One of the last things he said to me was he was tired of being everybody's daddy," Rebecca said. "It's not a 9-to-5 job. People also don't understand the ugliness they (police officers) see every day."

Rebecca, 52, lives in West Lawn about two blocks from the house where she and Officer Scott E. Donahue lived - and where he killed himself on Aug. 18, 1997.

Scott was a decorated officer and Rebecca was a dispatcher for the borough police, which is how they met.

Now an installation coordinator for a local heating and air conditioning company, Rebecca still listens to a police scanner when she's home.

"It's just a habit," she said. "I don't even think about it being on anymore."

Scott always said a great aspect of their marriage was that Rebecca knew what he was going through every day. Nonetheless, like the spouses of many cops, she worried about the job's effects on him - and their relationship.

Because each day could have been his last, Rebecca and Scott spent the first 10 minutes and the last 10 of every day by themselves to talk.

In addition to the stress, Scott also was nervous about how his children with his first wife were going to take the news that he had married Rebecca. He shot himself the night before he was supposed to tell his children he had married Rebecca six weeks earlier.

They were newlyweds, but they had been together for a few years and Scott seemed happy.

They danced on the lawn in the rain and listened to Frank Sinatra as they sipped drinks.

A premeditated act

The suicide apparently had been planned for days, if not longer, Rebecca said.

That was obvious, she added, only in retrospect.

A few days before his death, they were sitting on the porch talking about a promotion she just received and he looked at her and said, "You'll be OK."

"You mean 'We'll be OK,' " Rebecca responded.

"Yeah, yeah, that's what I meant," Scott stammered.

He also had once casually mentioned that if he ever shot himself, he would shoot himself in the chest.

"He knew it was a sure thing, and he always told me a head shot is not a sure thing," she said.

On another occasion, he told her: "Just remember, life goes on."

The day he shot himself, he painted their front door red, saying he'd always wanted to live in a house with a red door.

"He had to have that door red that night," Rebecca said.

She never understood why it was so important to him, but the door remains red. She gets chills when she walks past that door now.

Gunshot in the dark

That night, Scott took Rebecca's head in his hands and, with tears in his eyes, asked her if she knew how much he loved her.

She said she did and that she loved him, too.

They kissed, and she went to bed.

Later, it became clear that he had said goodbye, not good night.

Her children, a son who was 15 and a daughter who was 12, were startled by the gunshot.

They also heard Scott scream after he shot himself in the chest with a Colt .380-caliber pistol that Rebecca had once given him as a gift.

Rebecca didn't hear the gunshot because she was in her bedroom with the door closed and an air conditioner running.

The daughter woke her.

Rebecca's children had to endure the trauma of seeing Scott drawing his last breaths and watching their mother shrieking in horror and panic.

Scott tried to speak, but Rebecca couldn't understand what he was saying.

When Rebecca called 9-1-1, she became one of the hysterical people she dealt with as a dispatcher.

At the hospital, she screamed for doctors to save Scott.

But he was dead on arrival.

A few days later, Rebecca drank a lot of wine and looked at the bloody gun laying on her coffee table.

"I thought about doing the same thing," she said.

Aftermath of tragedy

Rebecca called Robert F. Johnson, who was then a Wyomissing officer and is now a detective in the Berks County district attorney's office.

In Rebecca's backyard, she and Johnson used a sledgehammer to break the gun into pieces.

Rebecca was furious with Scott.

"I was mad at him for copping out, for leaving me," she said. "I don't know why he thought that was the only answer."

For weeks, Rebecca slept with a shirt Scott had been wearing earlier that day.

For months, she cried more often than she could count.

For years, her refrigerator contained five beers from a six-pack Scott had bought that day.

His voice mail greeting at the police station was left on his phone for 10 years.

"I called a lot," Rebecca said. "A lot. I left him a lot of messages."

Chief Jeffrey R. Biehl wasn't about to erase the greeting.

"People would call it to hear him say, 'This is Officer Scott Donahue,' " Biehl said. "I knew people were calling it for comfort. People called it a lot.

"Around 2007 the phone system broke down, and all the messages were lost. But we had that message on there until the phone system gave up the ghost."

There's a plaque and a photograph of Scott adorned with a black ribbon in a hallway at the Wyomissing Police Department.

"If we ever move, that's going with us," Biehl said.

Reflections on tragedy

Rebecca said widows of police killed in the line of duty usually have someone - an armed robber, a reckless driver - to blame.

"For me, it's a little extra bad because it was his fault," she said.

And unfortunately, without that person to blame, some people blamed Rebecca for not stopping him.

She had asked him to get treatment for alcohol abuse, but he said he didn't want to be away from her for 28 days.

She offered to go with him, but he didn't want help.

"Scott, like most cops, didn't want to be seen as weak," she said.

Rebecca worked for a state law requiring officers to see a mental health professional once a year. It didn't pass.

"It doesn't make you look weak," she said of seeing a mental health professional. "Doesn't shooting yourself make you look weaker?"